Bush: “We don’t torture”—but don’t put it in writing

Bush’s statement came in response to a reporter’s question about the recent revelations concerning the network of secret concentration camps that his administration, the CIA and the Pentagon have created from Afghanistan, to Iraq, Cuba, eastern Europe and Thailand.

Well over 10,000 people are imprisoned in these camps without charges or any rights to a hearing, representation or a trial. In most cases, they have simply disappeared without any notification of their families as to what has become of them.

According to the Washington Post, prisoners in the CIA’s facilities are kept in “dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them.” The paper also points out that “interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’.... They include tactics such as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.”

“Will you let the Red Cross have access to them?” the reporter in Panama asked about the detainees. “And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture.”

Cheney took the extraordinary step last month of going to Capitol Hill with CIA Director Porter Goss in an attempt to pressure senators into exempting the CIA from a proposed amendment that would ban “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of prisoners in US custody. Unless the exemption is inserted, the White House has threatened to veto the measure, which passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 9.

Bush dodged the reporter’s questions, but the answers are clear. No, he will not grant the Red Cross access to the CIA’s gulag and the thousands of “disappeared” being held by America’s secret police. And yes, he agrees with Cheney; any attempt to turn his verbal disavowal of torture into written law must be quashed.

It was over the word “torture” that Bush took umbrage. “We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice,” the US president said. “We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.”

On the same day that Bush made his remark in Panama, military officials in Baghdad announced that five American soldiers of the 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq had been charged with physically abusing three detainees in September.

“The detainees got bruises and contusions, caused by striking with a closed and open hand, and hitting with an object described as a broomstick,” a military spokesman said.

Citing a Pentagon source, the Washington Post reported: “So far, the Army has investigated more than 400 allegations of detainee mistreatment, and more than 230 soldiers and officers have faced courts-martial, non-judicial punishments and administrative punishments.”

These cases are just the tip of the iceberg, representing egregious incidents that the Pentagon was unable to conceal. These numbers indicate that the photographs from Abu Ghraib that shocked the entire world were not an aberration, but merely an accurate representation of systemic torture and abuse that are the inevitable byproduct of an illegal war and colonial occupation.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/bush-n09.shtml